For years I've been pointing out the obvious; if you assess individuals by themselves, and you assess them before they join your organization, you are not assessing the actual people who will be working for you. 

The reasons are simple enough; most high-value work is done in groups, and once a person joins your organization, they're altered by the experience, and they alter the people already working there.  I have reiterated these thoughts dozens of times, and it's very gratifying to read, for the first time, about scientific confirmation of some of these intuitive connections.

This study out of MIT is absolutely fascinating.  Here's the money quote:

“Intuitively, we still attribute too much to individuals and not enough to groups. Part of that may just be that it’s simpler; it’s simpler to say the success of a company depended on the CEO for good or bad, but in reality the success of a company depends on a whole lot more,” said Thomas W. Malone, director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and senior author of the recent study, published in the journal Science. “Essentially what’s happening as our society becomes more advanced and more developed is that more things are done by groups of people than by individuals. In a certain sense, our intuitions about how that works haven’t caught up with the reality of modern life.”

Twenty years from now, assessing someone alone, without context to a group or purpose, will be seen as the quackery that it really is.